Bill Gates out a billion bucks!

Ouch!

David Seaton's News Links
A 19th century Spanish political boss, the count of Romanones once said, "let others write the laws, leave the regulations to me."

While the USA goes around invading countries and killing people and other such he-manly activities. The European Union does all the girly-man stuff like socking it to Microsoft.

I suppose its just the crumminess of human nature that keeps so many of us from feeling Bill Gates's pain. DS

European Court Rejects Microsoft Antitrust Appeal - New York Times
Abstract:In a stinging rebuke to the world’s largest software maker, the second-highest European court rejected today a request by Microsoft to overturn a 2004 European Commission antitrust ruling that the company had abused its dominance in computer operating systems. The European Court of First Instance, in a starkly worded summary read to a courtroom of about 150 journalists and lawyers here, ordered Microsoft to obey a March 2004 commission order and upheld the €497.2 million, or $689.4 million, fine against the company. The court’s presiding judge, Bo Vesterdorf, reading a summary of the decision on his final day in office, said, “The court finds the commission did not err in assessing the gravity and duration of the infringement and did not err in setting the amount of the fine. Since the abuse of a dominant position is confirmed by the court, the amount of the fine remains unchanged.” “The court said the commission wins on virtually everything,” said Thomas Vinje, a partner at the law firm Clifford Chance and part of the legal team for the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, a coalition that includes Microsoft opponents like I.B.M. “The court has spoken. The commission was right.” In a one-line statement this morning, the European Commission said it welcomed the ruling on Microsoft, without giving any further details.(...) Microsoft has already been forced to pay nearly €1 billion in fines in the nine-year-old legal case, which has pitted the software maker based in Redmond, Wash., against the commission and a host of competitors, including I.B.M., Sun Microsystems, RealNetworks and Novell. READ IT All